


We Happy Few; We Band of Brothers

by 1f_this_be_madness



Category: Fallen Angels (novel by Walter Dean Myers)
Genre: F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Post-Vietnam, The Vietnam War, Veterans, friendships, issues finding home, relationships, repairing life and livelihood, shunning of soldiers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 02:25:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4245903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1f_this_be_madness/pseuds/1f_this_be_madness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four years after Richard Perry and his best friend Peewee Gates return from Vietnam, they are invited to the wedding of one of the guys in their old unit, Monaco. On the night before the ceremony, Richie and Peewee check into a hotel and head out for a night on the town. There they run into a few old friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Happy Few; We Band of Brothers

Me and Peewee got a motel room near Monaco’s church on the night before the wedding, because Peewee doesn’t walk so good or fast any more, but he still wants to check out the perimeter. Mama dropped us off in the city. She was worried about us being there, I could tell.

“Will you boys be all right, Richard?” she asked me.

“Shoot, Mrs. Perry, this ain’t nothing. I got your son safe outta Nam—there’s nothin’ I can’t handle in this city. Don’t you worry.” 

I nod thankfully at Peewee, and Mama smiles at him warmly. He became close to her when she wrote letters to both of us over there, and is always welcome at our house in Harlem. It doesn’t mean a thing that he needs to walk with a cane and has one leg that’s mostly metal…Peewee Gates is still the toughest sonofabitch I know.

We dump our duffels in the room ourselves, because the desk clerk and valets got wary and leery of us once they realized we were in Vietnam. I think I handled it okay, but Peewee almost bashed a guy’s head in. We go strolling around town and are on our way back to the hotel when I catch sight of a tall curly-haired guy on the street in front of us. 

“Is that Lobel?!” I ask Peewee. 

“Only one way to find out,” my best friend says. “Hey! Jew boy!!” 

People whirl and stare at us in outrage; except for the tall man, who is, in fact, Lobel. He gets an almost fractured light in his eyes as he jogs up to us.

“Peewee? Peewee Gates and Richard Perry! Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s us, man! Get your tall ass over here so I can give you a hug or somethin’.” 

The ‘something’ he gives is a sloppy kiss on the cheek, which makes Lobel go bright red and shove Peewee back. “Ha-ha!” my friend crows. “I knew I’d plant one on ya one day.” Lobel simply shakes his head and turns to me.

“How are you, Perry?”

“Doing okay. It’s good to see you, Lobel.” We shake hands.

“You too. Can you believe we’re all here for Monaco’s wedding??”

“That he actually went through with it, you mean?”

“I don’t know about that; I just can’t believe we’re BACK.”

“Me either. Four years out and it still seems like yesterday. Apparently there are peace talks going on again.” 

Lobel snorts. He has little hope, just as I do, that the U.S. will do anything to actually get its soldiers out of Vietnam. They told us that the war would be over in 1969, and look where we got. “Do you know if Johnson or Walowick is coming?” I change tack.

“Nah, I just heard from Jamal. You know he’s a social worker at the VA now?”

“No shit, really?” laughs Peewee. “Our little Jamal is movin’ up in the world, man!”

“Don’t know how high any one of us is going with a job like that, though,” Lobel answers caustically. 

We all get quiet. The way the World has treated veterans after Nam really isn’t so hot. My Harlem neighborhood grudgingly accepted me back, but Peewee’s folks were hit kinda hard in Chicago. And none of us want to bring up Lobel’s life in California. His fractured eyes and stony silence are all that we get and need.

“You ever get a job in Hollywood?” I ask Lobel. He grins hard.

“Nah. You’d think I could, don’t’cha? Ever since Nam I know I can shoot SOMEthing…just not what a Hollywood director would want me to shoot. S’okay, though. I’ve got myself a little gig pet-sitting.”

“Pet-sitting?” Peewee guffaws. “Somebody’d let you take care of their dog?!”

“Nothing wrong with the dog. It’s the humans—owners—I don’t like.” 

'THEY don’t care for ME,' he meant. 'I’m a monster, a baby-killer, a psycho veteran. But I’ll also take a job—any job—for super cheap, which is why they hired me.' I know what his words and silence mean; I’ve seen it with other guys I know, even had some problems myself once or twice. I have a job now, thank God; took me quite a while to get it. Peewee can’t stand up for too long, and he’d need to sit at some desk if he got a job. He sold that old coin of his, though, and will have some money for a long time—enough to buy the first round tonight, he says, so after a spell of standing we go inside the hotel bar for some drinks. 

“A bachelor party for the eligible bachelors—of which Monaco ain’t one!” Peewee grins. 

I shoot a call to Julie, the bride-to-be, surreptitiously asking if she’ll send Monaco our way for a war buddy reunion. She is real keen on the idea and asks, if she tells Johnson and Brunner, would that be okay? I’m not so sure about Brunner, but it’d be a shame for us to miss the chance to see our unit’s hog gunner again; so I tell her, “Yeah, send ‘em.”

“Walowick just got in town too—I’ll see if I can get ahold of him as well.”

“Thanks, Julie.”

“No problem, Richie. Can’t wait to see you tomorrow!”

She’s a great girl, a rock for our Monaco. Waited patiently for him to get settled in at home with a steady job and everything before marrying. She knows what her fiancé’s wartime pals mean to him, and she loves all of us; neither shifty-eyed nor jealous of the time we spend together sometimes, the way other folks are. "It’s not right for these boys to be so close" people had told both Mama and Mrs. Gates— "it shows an…unnatural feelin’ for each other, what they should only feel for a woman." Thank God Mama didn’t pay any attention to or take any stock in that. She understands there were some experiences we had in Nam that bonded us closer than brothers. Julie gets it too. But Peewee and Lobel, with their families, they haven’t been quite as lucky.

I’m not facing toward the door, so it’s Peewee who first spots Monaco and the other guys coming in. He can’t get comfortable in any place unless he’s cased the whole perimeter or sits facing the door. I get that part of him, the one that never lets down his guard; the part that keeps him pacing up and wide-awake most nights because he hears mortar rounds and gunfire the minute he falls asleep. I hear and see those things in him, just as I spot them in the three men that follow Monaco across the threshold: Johnson stepping light as a cat as if he still carries the pig; Walowick behind and a little to the side of him, muttering “Easy, buddy, easy”; Brunner taking command, the way he always did—especially later on—in country. Monaco’s up front, on point as always; but unlike the others he is also relaxed and happy. He doesn’t shy away from hotel staff or patrons, doesn’t jump at the louder noises. He’s attuned to it, sure; he registers it all, but as the sounds and doings of a society at peace rather than the hottest zone in the midst of a war. I’m that way too, I realize. I’ve adapted like Monaco. I have guided Peewee, who often takes cues from me on calming down. He does this now, settling his shoulders as they get to our table and we all exchange handshakes and hugs.

After everyone gets settled around the booth, it takes a little while for Brunner to feel relaxed. Maybe he remembers how irritating he was to the rest of us, back when he acted like he was elected God in our unit; but I realize we were all just dumb kids, and the way Brunner was kept us safe (most of the time). He was still an asshole plenty of times, like when he kept calling the Vietnamese “gooks” and ordered all the rest of us around before Lieutenant Carroll or even Sergeant Simpson gave the orders. But he adapted to the place then, and he’s adapted here too—not as well as me or Monaco, but he’s held a high level job for a while, the manager of a company that makes some sort of cutting-edge technological tool.

“Still ordering people around, eh?” Monaco teases him. 

At first I think Brunner will get mad, but he only flashes a wry grin and says,

“That’s right. I’m still elected God; this time I just get paid better for it.” 

We all laugh after a beat of shock at that. Johnson flashes his teeth for but an instant, while Peewee nearly busts a gut. Walowick is still working on his parents’ farm, while Johnson is in the big city at a factory lifting the big machines no one else wants to touch. Apparently there was one run-in he had with his boss, the foreman, which brought Walowick in off the farm to vouch for Johnson.

“It was a hell of a big blowup, actually,” Walowick said to me. “Basically Johnson said the foreman did something that reminded him of Dongan—you remember, that assclown of a lieutenant who’d had such a bad time in Korea?” 

Yeah, I still remember: the guy who told us all that Nam was nothing. The Viet Cong were babies compared to the Koreans…then he’d gone and got his leg blown off from a trap a VC’d set and died probably realizing he was wrong. Anyway,

“Johnson exploded on the poor guy,” Walowick adds.

“Damn. What did ya say to him, Johnson? C’mon, don’t leave us hangin!” Peewee begs, groaning theatrically. 

Walowick prompts him too, and the ex-60 gunner sighs and finally growls,

“I said, ‘DONGAN IS DAMN LUCKY HE GOT KILLED BEFORE I COULD FRAG HIM, BUT YOU?! YOU PUT MEN IN DANGER LIKE IT’S A JOKE, IT’S NOTHIN’, NO SKIN OFF YOUR BACK. BUT I’LL TELL YOU SOMETHING MR. FOREMAN, I’VE MET VIETCONG KIDS WITH MORE BALLS THAN YOU AND KILLED THEM, SO YOU BETTER WATCH YOUR FUCKING BACK!!!’And I put him up against his office wall—feet 'bout 48 inches off the floor—with one hand.”

“Holy shit.”

We go to the church later that night…or early morning, actually. Peewee suggests this course of action and says something about 

“Giving it to the Congs, man.”

“What are we giving ‘em?” Walowick asks. 

Peewee throws an arm around him.

“Peace, brother. Just peace. I don’t wanna fight this war no more.”

The rest of us glance at one another. I expect someone to make a comment—Brunner to be snide about the fact that the U.S. is still over there, so peace obviously isn’t possible; but he doesn’t. No one else does either. We all want to make peace, I guess; if not collectively as a country, at least individually for ourselves. I for one still haven’t forgotten the first enemy I saw and killed; the man who’d come out of nowhere in a village hooch. He had probably been meaning only to protect himself and his property…he may not even have been a Viet Cong. I don’t know that for sure, and it still haunts me. Just like the sight of his face did, all exploded with bits of teeth and jawbone scattered around bloody pulp and brain matter. But now, I’m not scared anymore; I remember the fear and hatred and horror I’d felt that day, but the only emotion I can muster at this point is sorrow. 

I go to the front of the nave next to the altar and light a candle, bowing my head and sending out a prayer for the man I killed, and all of the others who died—Lieutenant Carroll and Brew and Jenkins and Judy I personally knew, but I send out thoughts to all of the others Killed In Action, soldier or civilian, Vietnamese or American. This is the first time in four years that I have not prayed for myself: ‘Let me overcome this obstacle, Lord. Let me come home and let the World accept me. Let me be strong and together’. He may have answered those personal prayers in ways that I did not know, but tonight I feel a sense of comfort and approval that had not been present before. Glancing around at the others, I spot calm acceptance and, yes, peace on the faces of my band of brothers. Hope flickers like the candlelight; small and snuffable yes, but also stubbornly steadfast. Just like the seven of us.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the men and women who have fought and still fight on behalf of their nations, in order to protect their countries, comrades, families, friends, ideals, and civilians around the world.
> 
> This work of mine is a follow-up to Walter Dean Myers' 1988 novel Fallen Angels.
> 
> The title is a quote from the famous speech of King Henry V in William Shakespeare's play of that name. It occurs in Act IV, Scene iii: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition". 
> 
> I would like to thank the professor of my independent study course on Literature of the Vietnam War Era, as well as the social worker that I spoke to at the VA hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Through their invaluable knowledge and compassion--both being veterans of that "little bitch of a war" (as Vietnam was described by Lyndon Baines Johnson)--I went on to read this novel and shall continue to educate myself about warfare in general and the Vietnam War in particular.
> 
> Fallen Angels has been a banned text in schools ever since it was initially published, due to the fact that it apparently contains unflattering views of America's military and civilians during the war in Vietnam, as well as the use of profanity and slurs. In one school district, it was challenged for "profanity, descriptions of drug abuse, sexually explicit content, and torture". Two out of those four things are true: the profanity and the torture. However, any literature about any war contains those things because THAT IS WHAT HAPPENS IN A WAR ZONE! People are forced to become inhumane, but they are also capable of rising above the horror and returning to the world with hope. This is what occurs in Myers' book, I think; it ends with hope. I wanted to continue the truth of that novel, because it never let me go from the first page to the last. People need to know what soldiers and veterans go through.
> 
> If you are interested in any of this information, including how soldiers function during war and after they return home, I would suggest as a valuable resource Dr. Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Another informative book is Edward Tick's War and the Soul.
> 
> Fictional accounts about Vietnam are many and varied; they specifically include The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien and Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann. Read at your own discretion.


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